The Chronic Diaries: Life Filtered Through Leukemia

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12/14/12 Connecticut Horror

Who kills his mother than goes to the Kindergarten Class where she teaches and opens fire on her students? A crazy, mixed up 20 year old named Adam Lanza, that’s who. This is an unspeakably horrible incident. We seem to hear about school and workplace shootings all the time, starting with Charles Whitman who killed 13 and wounded 32 more from the bell-tower on the campus of The University of Texas in Austin on August 1, 1966. We remember the Columbine, Colorado, incident. We remember the Virginia Tech incident. We even remember the incident at the Lockheed-Martin plant in my own hometown of Meridian, Mississippi, when disgruntled employee Doug Williams killed 6 co-workers, shot 7 more, then killed himself.

Why don’t these people just kill themselves to begin with? They seem determined to take as many with them as they can. They are Godless people who have heard the voice of evil and carried it out.

I have no answer for this great evil. I have no answer for behavior that is so damaging to others. I can only think that the violence continually present in our entertainment is partially to blame. Many others will point to guns and their availability, but that doesn’t satisfy, either. Lots of people possess firearms and never commit murders or multiple-murders with them. Lots of people watch violent movies and play violent video games and never commit crimes. What is it in the exceptions that trigger them?

I mourn for the victims and the families of the victims, and for the family of Adam Lanza as they struggle to make sense of of what just happened. There will be no sense to make of it, other than Lanza just went crazy. Something in him snapped, and suddenly he felt he was doing the right thing. Or if he knew he was doing the wrong, there was no sense of morality to stop him. What is it that makes men’s hearts so dark and fearful that the only way they see out is committing suicide immediately after taking out as many others as they can? Who are they hoping to get even with?